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The Media Oxpecker: How To Build A Fucking Website

Every Friday we round up media & tech industry news you may have missed while you were busy distributing free condoms to the citizens of Boise.

  • This week The Awl celebrated its second year of existence, an existence that continues despite its “unwillingness to play by the stupid rules in order to win on the terms of what other people seem to have set for us.”

    Put another way, in a media landscape that seems to reward SEO-driven, pageview-whoring content of the HuffPo and Demand Media variety, the fine folks behind The Awl have built a profitable website and an intensely-loyal audience by churning out quality content — smart, funny, irreverent (sound familiar?) — without succumbing to SEO-gimmickry and tasteless self-promotion.

    Says publisher David Cho:

    I think we’re all very happy with the product that we’ve made—Choire [Sicha] and Alex [Balk] with the site’s content, and myself with the model we’ve built to monetize that same unique and thoughtful content without compromising too much of ourselves.

  • Speaking of SEO-gimmickry, Demand Media said this week that Google’s recent algorithm change has led to “moderately lower” traffic to its websites, which includes the site eHow. The company also said, however, that outside observers have “significantly overstated” the negative impact of the change.

  • Have media companies dropped the ball by not creating their own Flipboard news reading apps? This guy thinks so:

    For a large media company (or consortium), inventing their own Flipboard would have yielded full control of the business model: smart advertising and/or a paid-for Premium Flipboard offering high-quality streams of articles (otherwise accessible behind a paywall) and curated third party content. As a reader, I would love to have the best of blogs selected by my favorites writers and columnists.

    But have no fear, Google may be working behind the scenes to create a “Flipbook killer”, so problem solved, right?

  • News.me, a social news app for the iPad, launched this week. Normally this would cause concern for publishers, but this one had the support of major publishers, says Peter Kafka:

    The most interesting thing about News.me is that it’s an aggregator blessed by some publishers that haven’t always been hospitable to aggregators.

    There’s the New York Times, for starters, which handed over the beginnings of the service to Bit.ly in exchange for cash and equity. And the Associated Press, which often butts heads with the Web, has signed on, too.

    So have Forbes, and AOL and many of its sub-brands, and a good chunk of the blogosphere–Gawker Media, Business Insider, Gigaom, Mashable, VentureBeat, etc.

  • What does your Twitter usage say about your ability to maintain relationships? Both the Village Voice and SF Weekly have answers for you.

  • Not only are the machines tracking everywhere you go, they’re also plotting to take your job from you.

  • Since the introduction of its paywall, the New York Times has convinced over 100,000 people to pay for access to its content. But was the New Yorker‘s “like-wall” campaign more impressive? By making a story available only to people who liked it on Facebook, it gained over 17,000 new followers.

  • Is the social media frenzy turning into an economic bubble?

  • “Magazine publishers are not only trying to pack more features and content into their apps—they’re also trying to design for an ever-growing variety of devices and formats.”

  • Gannett’s digital revenues are rising, but so are the costs.

  • And finally: Just how much has web traffic declined at Gawker since its redesign? Observers disagree! The people at this website have a good analysis, so you should probably go check that site out, if you haven’t already.